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A lot of people seem to think that a higher price leads to more money, so developers who charge a high price are greedy. Second, why should a player care how many people worked on a game? If I had a magic wand and could produce a game with the same scale and quality of Skyrim or GTA: V instantly with no effort, would that make the game experience worth any less? If I spent $20 million dollars producing a fart app, would that mean it’s worth paying more for? No. No, it would not.

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Incidentally, the reverse is also true. Players are acting in their own short-term self-interest by waiting for sales. They can get a free ride from the people who pay full price (or from the developer who can’t earn a living), and get the same games at a small fraction of the price. Unfortunately, that’s not good for players as a group. If players insist on only buying during heavily discounted sales, then eventually quality will wither away. Just look at the App Store.

A talk from the Indiecade East from Feb 2014, a really great perspective about games.

All these voices in our head, all these ghosts, can lead a critic unwittingly towards self-censorship, or at the very least a kind of mealy-mouthed rhetoric. We get a steady stream of IMHOs and the nervous qualification of any declarative sentence. We see writers so self-conscious about perceived elitism or giving offense that they hesitate to judge anything at all.

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The personal is so readily dismissed as the source of taste, of bias, something on the fringe, when it is in reality the essential, unstable core of the game experience. It gives the indie critic his insights into the game and reveals both the player’s and the game’s values.

I can see it in other things now too: architecture has long been moving away from a dichotomy of inside/outside, and it’s only broadened the vocabulary of space and made for better buildings, buildings that take advantage of the landscape as much as shelter from it. Without giving up on having colloquially understood definitions of inside & outside, we’ve embraced spaces that are various amounts of both, or neither.

Can you be outside and still inside architecture?

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If Halo is 10% cut scenes is it less of a game than chess? What about games that are 50% cutscenes?

And if games are defined by mechanics, how come games that are purely mechanics are called “casual”, while the majority of hardcore/canon/”true gamer”/cultural touchstone/AAA are the ones with large “non-game” elements and sections?